Hila Laviv

Secret Passages, Wardrobes with Missing Back Panels, Holes and Burrows

In the middle of the exhibition space, which explores drawing as one of the tools in the art historian’s arsenal, artist Hila Laviv offers another perspective on the work of Aby Warburg – who was her great-granduncle. Laviv’s practice, which makes extensive use of cutting and pasting methods, echoes the Warburgian thinking with its juxtaposition of images and collagist displacements. This thinking is present not only in Warburg’s famous Mnemosyne Atlas, but also in the family albums that Laviv inherited from her grandmother.

The work references an architectural feature of the space where Warburg’s thinking took place – his library. Warburg chose to open an oval hole in the ceiling of his library – a cosmic opening through which one can look outside. Laviv takes this opening apart and reassembles it into an inward-turning vortex. The supposedly stable architecture spins in the wind, resonating its history: On the eve of the Second World War, the entire content of the oval library was smuggled from Hamburg to London, leaving the structure an empty shell that was soon seized and nationalized. Eventually it was carefully restored and regained its function as the Warburg Institute, which also stands as a relic of a world that no longer exists.      

Secret Passages, Wardrobes with Missing Back Panels, Holes and Burrows oscillates between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional – a photo that becomes an object, and with that, amplifies the question of illusion. The deconstruction of shape, as a central part of the thinking process, is found in drawings by art historians as well as in Laviv’s practice. But while the drawings trace the trajectory of a thought process, Laviv's artwork brings to life the space it pierces, and the structure it stirs.